The secret garden

You are a garden locked up...

- Song of Songs 4:12a

Chris Bowater writes:

I love gardens. I hate gardening... I enjoy walking though the great parks found in cities but take greater pleasure in discovering the creativity and colour of a private garden. Here, a labour of love, years of careful attention can be viewed.

How often our walk with God is on the terms of giving him access to the public gardens of our lives. Content that he is seen to be with us in the carefully selected and prepared open forums, the public meetings and ministry, the vast gardens of the outer life. All the time he longs to have access to the private place, the secret garden. He knows that the worth of our public agendas is always in relation to the openness of the hidden life. What we are at home is what we really are. What we are in the secrets of our hearts and desires is what we really are. The master longs to be given entrance, not that he might criticize or condemn but that he might begin to renew and rebuild. More than that, he does not always want to share us with everyone else. He wants us to himself, to talk, to listen, to share or quite simply, just be there.

- Chris Bowater, "Creative Worship" in Housegroups - the leaders' survival guide (Crossway books, 2001) pp. 84-85